


In Judgment

by nirejseki, robininthelabyrinth (nirejseki)



Series: Coldflash Week 2018 [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, War, coldflashweeks 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 05:41:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14349105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/robininthelabyrinth
Summary: Barry's been fighting the war against the hunters on behalf of the supernatural community and the metahuman community alike, him and everyone else. Having Len around to help with the planning and the missions has been a fantastic help, even if no one seems to entirely know what type of supernatural Len actually is.Now if only Barry can stop getting distracted by Len's hair...





	In Judgment

**Author's Note:**

> For Coldflashweeks 2018: Creature AU

Len's hair is growing out.

_Yes_ , Barry's aware that that's a stupid thing to be focusing on right now, what with the hunters gearing up for their next big attack and the supers being stretched thing trying to prepare for it.

Admittedly, Barry can scarcely remember a time when the supers _weren't_ being stretched thin. 

And not just with this war, neither; the supernatural community’s always been hard-hit. 

Maybe when he was very young, before the Wolf in Yellow attacked him and turned him into a werewolf, bringing him into the supernatural community by sheer force. It'd been an awful time for Barry: his mom dead, his dad in prison, Joe taking him in but trying to deny the truth of what happened by sheer force of will and denial.

It might've worked, too, if Mom's murder had been the only thing to go wrong, but the whole "turning into a werewolf on the full moon" thing was pretty hard to ignore, even for Joe. 

Joe'd reluctantly gone in for some lessons on how to deal with it, especially once some trusted members of the supernatural community explained to him the fact that Barry would be at risk of hunters trying to kill him if he didn't get under control as soon as possible.

Fucking hunters. Zealots, the whole lot of them - racist, bigoted assholes who just couldn't let someone different live out their lives in peace and patted themselves on the back for it in the process.

There'd been a few attempts on Barry early on, solo hunters that Joe scared away with his gun and police badge, and they'd petered out pretty quickly. There hadn’t been so many of them back then.

It’d been okay to be a super in Central, then.

And like everything else, that changed when the Particle Accelerator explosion created the metahumans.

Barry's one of the people with the dubious honor of being both a supernatural (werewolf) and a meta (speedster), so he's one of the people helping bridge the communities together. 

Not that he initially did a great job at it, as the Flash. Sure, he was getting really bad advice from Thawne-pretending-to-be-Wells, but no one is ever going to let him forget about the metahuman prison thing he was involved with.

Either way, he'd been so focused on the metahuman thing that first year or two that he hadn't really given much thought about the hunters.

That was a mistake. 

The hunters certainly hadn't forgotten about _them_.

They'd gathered their forces together in a way they never had before, an army, and they'd laid siege to Central with the avowed goal of eradicating the super and meta menace, while the government wrung its hands together and complained and did nothing to stop them.

That's when they'd all gathered together to fight back, too - supers and metas, heroes and villains, anyone who hated the hunters. 

Barry's team, the heroes, the metas, the super community, the villains, everyone they could. Singh, a satyr and one of Barry's oldest teachers (and the guy who gave Joe the kick in the ass to get Barry trained), gave them what cover the CCPD could, while Camille at the DA's office (a dryad) helped get them away from the prisons before the hunters could get at them there.

It was a mess, of course. No one could agree on anything, no one could work together, no one agreed – metas didn’t want to work with supers, villains didn’t trust heroes, everything was totally screwed up.

Still, they managed to repel the first attack.

That just made the hunters come back twice as hard and twice as vicious. They launched a second attack from multiple vectors, just when the supers and metas were still celebrating their first victory.

It’d very nearly been a massacre.

It would have been, if the Legends hadn’t seen them coming as they flew in for a visit and managed to send out a warning.

That’s when Len all but moved in to STAR Labs to help coordinate the super-meta resistance efforts. 

It’d been a surprise to all of them, actually. 

Sure, Len had come back from the dead after sacrificing himself at the Oculus, but that had been a fluke of time and space and everything going to shit all at once (plus, apparently, the Legends opening a giant demon cage or something? Barry doesn’t want to know) and Barry hadn’t put together that Len was anything more than a very lucky human. He knew that Len was respected by metas, but the supers? He had no idea. It helps that Len’s never done anything inhuman in front of him, ever.

But no, apparently Len’s, like, some sort of long-standing leader in the super community, even though, when Barry asked around, it’s apparently a whole Thing that Len rather notoriously doesn’t do anything inhuman at _all_. Around anyone.

Ever.

No one even knows what type of super he is, just that he’s always identified as a super.

But that’s not important. What’s important is that he’s very well respected. The supers think highly of him because of his years of devoted service to the community. The metas think well of him because he’s one of the few people who could go up against the Flash without any powers.

And that means he’s the only person who can get them fighting together.

That’s when he and Barry started working together.

Len’s used to having a partner, after all, and Mick’s busy with the Legends (something about an escaped dragon herd rampaging through the timeline – Barry doesn’t want to know, and from Len’s expression when Mick called with the update, he didn’t either), so Barry volunteered for the role.

Well.

To be entirely accurate, he _got_ volunteered. Mick's a werewolf, too, and he was determined to have another wolf watching his partner's back while he was gone - something about pack instinct and Len being a, quote, total dumbass sometimes, end quote - and Barry was the one nominated to hold down the fort, both literally and figuratively. Barry wasn't exactly enthused at first, but, well, he _is_ a wolf and he's got these lovely pack instincts that he throws around everywhere, and it really isn't that much of a hardship to put Len into the right category. 

There'd been a whole shovel talk involved, too, which somehow managed to involve Mick conveying both "I will kill you if he dies again" and also "here's a list of vegetables he's willing to eat, don't let him die of scurvy either" and Barry's not entirely sure what to do with that.

Either way, they all agreed it would just be temporary, until the dragon thing got resolved, and so now Barry works with Len on just about everything: planning, execution, surveillance, anything the resistance needs.

He hadn’t expected to like working with Len so much. The man’s a villain, after all. And he’s bossy, self-centered, arrogant, charismatic, intelligent, funny, generous…

Barry likes working with him _so much_.

Eddie and Iris are always teasing him about having the world’s worst crush, and they’re not entirely wrong. 

And that leads him back to where he is now, thinking about Len’s hair growing out.

He’s never seen Len without it clipped short, these past months of working together, but they’ve been under siege in STAR Labs for over a month now, so Barry guesses that Len’s been too busy to cut it.

It’s really cute, actually. Barry wouldn’t have guessed that it curled naturally, a tight little corkscrew curl that rises up from Len’s head in a little aura. 

It’s just hair, just _Len’s_ hair, but…

Barry kind of can't take his eyes off of it. 

It's just so _unlike_ Len.

Len's normally so reserved and controlled, his motions precise, like he knows every last thing he's doing with every inch of his body.

(Barry thinks about it a lot, that precision, that control, that _self-assurance_...yeah. Okay, yes, he definitely has a stupid crush.)

The hair's an aberration from that.

Little curls, twisted around like - Barry fancies it's a little bit like a bunch of baby snakes napping together. Tight and controlled and wound up, just like Len is, but just a little bit messy. 

A little bit...

Wild.

_Unrestrained_.

Okay, so Barry's apparently _really_ into this new hair development. 

It's distracting, that's what it is. 

"- are you even listening?"

Also, Len's talking.

"Sorry, I drifted," Barry apologizes. "You were saying?"

Len stares at him. 

"What?"

"We're in the middle of an infiltration mission into the hunter’s facility to try to find out when their next attack will be," Len says flatly. "There are potentially hunters all around us. And you _drifted_?!"

"It...happens?"

Len hisses at him.

No, that's not right. 

There's definitely a hiss, but Len's still scowling, so it couldn't have been him.

The wind, maybe?

“Seriously, it’s a Speed Force thing,” Barry says quickly. “Sped up thinking means more drifting.”

Len doesn’t look convinced, but nods. 

“Though, while I’m at it, why _are_ we stopping to talk?” Barry asks. 

Len winces. 

“Len?”

“There’s something wrong down this way,” he says, nodding down one of the corridors. “I don’t know what, but there’s something. But it’s out of our way and we don’t have any intel from there, so the risk of encountering hunters and ruining the mission is significantly increased.”

Barry frowns. “And?”

Len makes a face. “It’s a big risk to take without evidence –”

“Len, you’re the best thief in the Gem Cities because you have amazing instincts,” Barry points out. “And you’re one of the best leaders for the resistance for the same reason. What’s the problem now?”

Len runs a hand through his hair (ugh, that _hair_ ) and makes another face. “My instincts are conflicted,” he says. “On one hand, they’re telling me that there’s something _wrong_ down that way, something we've gotta put a stop to.”

“On the other?”

“We go down there, chances are high that everything goes to shit. _Very_ high.”

“So, something’s definitely wrong, but we’re also screwed if we go after it,” Barry says. “But if you’re bringing it up mid-mission, it must be _really_ wrong." He shrugs. "You're always telling me to learn to let the plan go off the rails. Let’s go for it.”

Len’s lips curl up and he nods.

They slink down the corridor.

They find –

“They’re _infecting_ people,” Barry hisses, horrified. “There are _children_ here –”

“They’re making them supers,” Len says. His voice is very cold. “Children survive the transformation process better, that’s why they’re using them. Making them into supers –”

“But _why_? They’re hunters! They hate supers!”

“Super community’s close-knit,” Len says. “But these ones? These are supers that the super community doesn’t know to miss. Means they don’t know to rescue them. The hunters are testing their anti-super weapons on them.”

Barry looks away from the window into the labs. They’d found the main office; it was almost painfully banal, right until Len had flicked open the curtains that revealed a view into the labs beyond, with their rows and rows of children strapped onto beds and hazard signs all around. 

“What I don’t understand is why would they risk having it so close to Central,” Len says, scowling. They must’ve known the risk of us finding out would be greater if they do it here.”

Barry sees a file cabinet and presses his lips together. “Cover me.”

He speed-reads the files. 

“I know why they’re here,” he says grimly. 

Len glances at him.

“It's not just supers anymore,” Barry explains. "It's metas, too. Ideally, supers who are also metas."

Like him.

Len’s eyes narrow. “But how do you make new metas without a particle accelerator?” 

“No idea,” Barry says, jabbing at one of the pages. “But this Dr. DeVoe guy apparently has some theories -”

“Hey!” someone barks from the door. It’s a hunter.

“Time to go,” Len says, glancing at Barry. 

Barry nods and tries to run.

_Tries_.

“Flash?” Len says.

“It’s not working!”

“The meta dampening field works!” the hunter exclaims, starting to grin.

“Right,” Barry says, and shifts into werewolf form to lunge forward at superhuman speeds to rip out the hunter’s throat. 

“That works, too,” Len says dryly. “Now we run.”

They run.

Unfortunately, this portion of the hunter’s compound has very good automatic doors, apparently, and the dead hunter was just smart enough to hit an alarm before he tried to challenge them.

“Through the labs,” Len hisses when they hit the first set of dead ends.

They go through the labs.

“We can’t just leave them!” Barry yelps as he lopes through the labs at Len’s side. The children are staring at them – Barry especially, since he’s on all fours now. 

“We have to get _out_!” Len snaps back, but he looks torn.

He’s got a soft spot for kids a mile wide.

“It’s a doggy,” one of the kids whispers in awe, her eyes wide. "Look, it's a doggy!"

“ _Len_ ,” Barry whines.

Len is slowing down.

“There they are!” someone shouts. It’s a large group of hunters – at least thirty, and with the alarms now blaring, there’d be more soon.

Barry’s shoulders slump.

They can’t fight all these people here – not in a lab – the children could be hurt unintentionally – 

A cool, dry voice comes over the intercom. “Attack them now,” the man on the intercom says. “If necessary, shoot the children; it will distract them.”

Fuck no.

Barry puts on an extra burst of speed.

Len comes to a dead halt.

Barry doesn’t notice for an extra second, then realizes and puts the brakes. “Len! We need to get out of here before they start shooting –”

“Yeah,” Len says, but he’s already turning back.

“There’s _thirty_ of them –”

“Closer to fifty, I count,” Len says. 

“Len!”

“You’re clean, Barry,” Len says. His voice is very quiet. “But I don’t know if you’re quite clean enough. I’m going to need you to close your eyes.”

“What are you –”

“You too, children,” Len says, raising his voice. “Please close your eyes, if you can.”

“Len –”

“ _Now_ , Barry!”

Barry ducks down and closes his eyes.

Well, for a second.

Barry can't help but steal a peek through his fingers to find out what's going.

Some of the kids have covered their eyes.

Len is just staring at the hunters, almost like he's waiting patiently for them all to file into the room with their extremely deadly guns.

What is he waiting _for_?!

"Bring them down," the voice on the intercom says coolly. "Alive would be preferred, if possible."

Most of the kids have now covered their eyes.

"Get the dirty supe!" one of the hunters shouts, and lifts his gun. 

Then he falters. 

Barry glances at Len through the crack in his fingers and abruptly gapes.

Len's face is glowing.

Not, like, 'wow it's so beautiful' sort of glowing, which Barry sort of thinks it does on a regular basis, but _actually_ glowing. His eyes are like little flashlights in his skull - not like Barry's eyes, which reflect light back the way a wolf does, but actually generating their own light.

And his hair -

Okay, Barry has to admit that he had the thought earlier that Len's mess of curls looked a bit like an adorable mass of snakes, but apparently he was more correct than he'd realized because Len's hair has _actually_ turned into a mass of snakes, each tiny curl of hair now extended up, waving menacingly from side to side and hissing through the little eyeless snake heads they'd formed. 

"You have hurt children," Len says, and his voice shakes Barry's bones. “You have done wrong.”

The light on his face is getting brighter. 

It's - it's weird, actually. Some part of Barry really likes the light, it making him feel good and brave and righteous, but another part of Barry feels queasy at it, feels low and awful and like the liar he knows he is sometimes. 

The latter feeling is starting to _burn_.

All of the kids have covered their eyes now.

Barry decides to stop sneaking a peek and cover his eyes properly.

"I judge you for what you have done," Len says, and his voice sounds like a thousand bells or gongs or horns all at once. "And I find you wanting."

Then there’s a flash of light so bright that Barry can see it through his fingers.

And then -

Nothing.

It's totally quiet.

And then the man on the intercom moans in agony, a crackle of static, and the intercom itself dies in a fritz of electricity.

"You can look now," Len says. His voice has gone back to normal.

Barry drops his hands at once, and -

"They're all _stone_!" he exclaims, staring at the very-close-to-fifty hunters that had piled in through the door. Many of them have their guns out.

Even more of them have their hands up, as if they could ward off the effects of Len's terrible gaze with their bare palms.

All of them have their faces twisted in expressions of terrible fear or pain.

"Yeah," Len says, his voice harsh like he's been yelling. "They're all stone now. Are all the kids okay? It shouldn't affect anyone under the age of reason."

Barry looks around. "I think they're all fine?" he offers, and tries to stand.

He wobbles. 

Len catches him. "Are _you_ all right?" he demands, his eyes white around the edges and his voice panicky. 

"Uh," Barry says, and does a quick analysis. One of his legs is dragging a little, like it's fallen asleep or something, but he can feel it starting to wake up already, all pins-and-needles. "Yeah, I think I'm okay? Mostly. I'm kind of really groggy."

"Good," Len says, sounding immensely relieved. "That means you're more well-intentioned than ill-intentioned."

"Uh. That's...good to know?"

Len snorts. "If you'd been evil, Flash, you'd be a _rock_ right now."

"The Flash isn't evil," one of the kids protests. "He's a hero!"

"The good opinions of others also helps a little," Len says dryly. "Either way, let's get out of here, shall we? And we'll take the kids with us. They're one of us, now."

Barry nods. "Yeah," he says. "But - that light - from your face - and your _hair_ -"

Len's hair is back to normal now, or at least back to the curly mess it was before the whole thing happened.

Len runs his hand through his hair a little self-consciously. "Yeah," he says with a cough. "That was the Gaze of a Gorgon; it judges people. We're the species that inspired the legend of the Furies. It's a whole thing."

"A - you're a _Gorgon_? I didn't even know Gorgons were a thing!"

"We're very rare," Len says. "Besides the Furies, I'm pretty sure Medusa is the only legendary figure we've got."

"You have _snake hair_ ," Barry marvels. That’s _so cool_. 

"Yeah," Len says. "Can we get the kids and go now? The Gaze fritzes technology pretty bad, so the meta dampening field should be down."

"Oh," Barry says, and tests his speed by vibrating his hand. It works. "Right. I'll gather the kids and meet you outside - wait, why do you never use that ability? It's _awesome_."

"It only works when my hair is long enough," Len says shortly. 

"But - then - why..?"

"The _kids_ , Flash!"

"Right!"

They get the kids out of there. Barry finds that he's slow and sluggish - by his standards, anyway, which is to say that he's still faster than most people can see - even as he runs, but he can feel the Speed Force cycling through his body and helping throw off the effect. 

Still, he's still fast enough to speed-search the facility to make sure they're not missing any of the kids (especially now that almost all the hunters left behind to guard it are stone) and meet Len outside with a nod.

He maybe also kinda sorta sabotages the whole place while he's at it.

"Flash," Len says, after they're a good distance away and the entire building behind them has just exploded. "That wasn't part of the plan."

"It was cool, though!" one of the kids exclaims, and the others nod furiously. "It was _super_ cool! _Flash_ cool!"

Barry winces. He _really_ hopes that doesn’t become a slang term. It's way too dorky. 

Len smirks, probably thinking the exact opposite. 

It's not until they've gotten back to STAR Labs that Barry finally has a moment to grab Len and zip him off to somewhere private to talk. 

"A closet, Barry?" Len drawls. "Something you want to tell me?"

"I'm waiting for _you_ to tell _me_ , actually," Barry shoots back. "What do you want to include in the report?"

Len looks surprised. "You'd be willing to lie?"

"I might be a hero, but I'm also pretty shitty at telling the truth," Barry says wryly. "That's part of why your Gaze hit me, right?"

"Part of it," Len agrees slowly. "Even if you weren’t looking – which I assume you stopped doing after a bit, don’t think I didn’t notice you peeking at the start – you still would have been affected by the voice, that's part of it."

"Is that why the man on the intercom...?"

"It wouldn't have worked perfectly on him," Len says. "Not through an electronic medium like that. But if he's the Dr. DeVoe who set up that lab, he's probably got enough evil that it would have had at least _some_ effect - probably calcified some of his bones or something." 

Barry thinks of those terrified kids, and the relieved tears of some of their parents when they’d found that that the kids they’d been looking for had been found again. Most of the stolen kids were from the streets, but a good number of them weren’t – the hunters had just taken whoever they thought would be a good subject for transformation, just picked them out of the slums under the assumption that their parents would be too poor to pay anyone to care about their lost children.

"Good,” he says.

Len's lips curl up in satisfaction.

"Now, why don't you do it more often?" Barry asks. "You took out nearly fifty people at once. That could be _insanely_ helpful to the resistance effort -"

"I know," Len says shortly. His smile has disappeared.

"Then why?" Barry asks, crossing his arms. He didn't mean to hit Len in a sore spot, but he has to ask it. "You usually keep your hair short - to avoid using it?"

Len is quiet, which means yes.

"We've been in a war zone for months, Len," Barry says quietly. "We've been working together - well, I thought. I think I deserve an answer."

Len flinches a little. "Yeah, Scarlet," he says. "I suppose you do."

Barry arches his eyebrows. 

"It's - it doesn't discriminate," Len says.

"What?"

"The Gaze. It doesn't know friend from foe. If you've done bad things, it goes after you - and most people have done at least _some_ bad things." Len grimaces. "I've killed people who were on my side before. People who - people I was close to. Sometimes _very_ close to. It wasn't their fault that they had a bit of evil in them, it wasn't even all that much evil, but the Gaze didn't care, and there’s no bringing them back."

"I'm sorry," Barry says, and means it. He knows how long it takes for Len to grow to like anyone, even a little, and to have accidentally killed someone he was close to must have been devastating.

"Besides," Len adds, swallowing a little and shaking his head as if he can banish all emotion by sheer will, which if any one can, it's Len, "it's also innately unfair."

"How do you mean?"

"A Gorgon can't be judged by their own Gaze," Len says. "The mirror thing’s a myth; Perseus only defeated Medusa because he was a Gorgon himself. But I'm worse than the vast majority of people around me. I'm a thief and a murderer and a liar - why should I of all people get to stand in judgment? The Gaze judged _you_ , Barry, and I _know_ you're a better person than me."

Barry flushes under the intensity of Len's stare. "I'm not -"

"You _are_ ," Len insists. "If it wasn't for your faith in me, I don't know how things might've ended up. If it wasn't for you - for Mick - well, the Oculus might've gone very differently, and I would've never forgiven myself for it."

"Mick knows?"

"Yeah, he knows," Len says, smiling a bit at the thought of his best friend. "He's going to kick my ass for letting my hair get long the way it has when he gets back from his hunt for the time dragons; I usually rely on him to remember to cut it. Actually, I should go do that now -"

"Aw, I like it long," Barry automatically protests.

Len pauses. Then a long slow smile starts up. "Do you now?"

"I," Barry says. He's gone bright red, he just knows it. "I mean. That is. Uh."

"Maybe I should keep it long for a bit," Len muses, his eyes fixed on Barry's as he steps closer. "As you said, it's a very useful skill. As long as we use it extremely sparingly, it shouldn't be that much of an issue."

Barry gulps. Len is standing very close.

"Mick did say something about picking up some goggles that I might be able to use to block the Gaze as well as the cold gun's glare," Len muses. He's moving still closer, and there's really not a lot of room in this closet.

Barry's back hits the wall. He's pinned.

He's okay with that.

"And there are some other perks to having it be a bit longer," Len purrs. "Aren't there?"

"There - are?"

"Oh, yes," Len says. "It makes it a lot easier for someone to get their hands into and _tug_."

"You -" Barry's gone all breathy. "Uh. You like that?"

Len's smiling. 

Barry might like Len's hair, but he _loves_ Len's smile.

"Only," Len breathes, his face only a few inches from Barry's, "when I'm on my knees." The smile broadens. "Wanna see?"

"Oh god," Barry whimpers, and pulls him in for a kiss. 

Len gives back as good as he's got.

(Even Len's hair approves of this new development. Barry can tell by the satisfied tone of the hissing.)


End file.
